What the patent examiners really ought to do is to set the bar MUCH higher for granting patents. They're not going to do that while they have a quota for granting patents though, rather than just a quota for processing patents.
My exact statement in my post in regards to that was this. "There are international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war and those should apply."
It was also stated that the prisoners at Gitmo did not have the same Constitutional rights as everyone else in our society. This was an incorrect statement.
As far seeing only what you want to see, I suggest you carefully examine your own response.
In times of war certain constitutional freedoms maybe suspended.
If we were actually at war, then that might be applicable. Since it was WWII the last time Congress has actually declared war against anyone, and they are the ONLY body Constitutionally allowed to do so, then that caveat does not apply. All Constitutional guarantees are still active, including the rights protected under statutory and treaty laws that derive their legality from the Constitution.
The fact that members of the executive branch seem to be ignoring such laws is an indication of their criminality, not of the correctness of their actions.
When has anyone in the US gone to jail for publishing a blog critical of the US government?
That's because the politicos in the U.S. are MUCH more advanced about manipulating the media than in China.
They don't have to throw anybody in jail (which can given credence to someone's message) when they can use the media to completely discredit anybody whose message starts becoming dangerous.
Once someone has been discredited in the eyes of the public, it becomes very difficult for them to say ANYTHING that will be taken seriously, even if what they're saying is perfectly true. People will (in some cases actively) rationalize why that person must be wrong.
I would like to see an investigation of what is going on at Gitmo but you do know that prisoners of war are NOT protected by the US constitution and never have been. They have no right to a trial or legal counsel. Trying to apply constitutional protections too them is invalid.
You are incorrect on a couple fronts.
1) The power of the U.S. Constitution (including the Bill of Rights + all of its amendments) applies to EVERYONE in U.S. jurisdiction, not just citizens.
There are only a few places in the Constitution which are specific to citizens, and they mainly have to do with defining who gets to vote, and who they get to vote for. Statutory law might be more specific, but there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents anyone under U.S. jurisdiction from receiving the same level of human rights protections as its citizens.
2) The U.S. Constitution specifically says that treaties that the U.S. is signatory to, must be given the same priority as the "law of the land". I suspect that the Founders wanted to reassure the rest of the world that the U.S. would take treaty obligations seriously, and not just blow off promises in the next session of Congress.
This includes the Geneva Convention, which has all that prisoner-of-war stuff that you (and the Administration) seem to be so intent on ignoring.
Well, let's just say that it's a LOT less effective to complain about human right violations in another country when you've got a list of human rights violations that your own country is violating being splashed across the pages of just about every newspaper and web site.
Although I have no doubts that kind of crap has gone on throughout history, at least in the past it was kept secret enough & at a low enough level that a lot of Americans could deny that it was happening.
Now it's so blatant that some people have given up trying to deny it, and turn around and try and JUSTIFY it. Strangely enough, any justification used for our own country's behavior is logically applicable to every other country's behavior.
Do you really think it's effective to complain about another country's human rights violations in that context?
As far as your example goes, would you be inclined to believe a police officer was arresting people for good reasons if you had been hearing nothing but news about how all of the officers from the department that officer came from were arresting random people with no more stated purpose "they looked suspicious"?
That would probably work most of the time, but there's always the chance that the identities of that fake news team would be leaked somehow & they might either be in trouble, or their associations could be tracked back to their superiors. Budding fascists tend to be "bully" types - they like to be able to hurt, intimidate & control while minimizing any risk to themselves.
Also, if they could get the dragonfly stuff to work right (assuming that such a system even exists), they can automate the process of scanning the crowd & collecting faces (including directing the individual flies to move to where they can get the best views of the largest # of faces) and collect a nice big database of potential troublemakers, whereas it would be a little harder to maneuver a team of people around to make sure you got the best pictures of everyone present.
As I've been mentioning before, it's hard to believe that there is such a system implemented in any practical sort of way, however. Just the power requirements would seem to limit keeping a tiny remote-controlled device aloft more than ~15 minutes at a time, much less receiving & transmitting any significant amount of information, and someone in a crowd of people might think it was odd if all of the "insects" keep on moving back to their home base to recharge/refuel.
Noting a public protest: "Wow, there's a lot of people at that protest - maybe we'd better address what they're saying so that we don't get voted out the next election cycle!"
Spying at a public protest: "Make sure you get a record of everyone's faces & match them up to names & addresses so we know who the troublemakers are."
Note that the 1st response doesn't require any sort of stealthy surveillance. I'm interested in hearing your opinion about the justification for the second kind of surveillance.
Of course, that assumes that these "mechanical dragonflies" that are being reported weren't just a figment of some peoples' imaginations, seeing as they were apparently so easy to see, but nobody managed to catch one of them & get a closeup picture of it.
If such a technology DOES exist, I think it would be a lot more useful to society if this kind of technology were used to keep track of the doings of our so-called public servants, along with anyone they interact with on a regular basis.
I suspect that for processes that don't require microgravity, it's much easier to work on the moon.
It's perfectly straightforward for a large enough space colony to create its own "gravity", at almost any level of Gs the superstructure can survive. On a planetary surface you're stuck with the gravity that the planet provides.
that's only an issue if you habitually leave your habitat, which either you have no reason to do
You have to go out & do maintenance on the buildings, or make new buildings at least. Even if you're using robots, you would have to bring the robots back into service them.
Lunar dust is particularly nasty because it's apparently small enough to cause silicosis (same sort of thing which abestos causes), plus the nanoparticles are particularly good at gumming up machines.
Now, the benefits of the moon (or other planetary surface): lots of raw material to work with, plus if we dig our colony deep we can get protection from meteorites & solar flares (only get partial protection if we're on the surface). Feel free to let me know if you can think of anything else.
I'm not sure that these advantages outweigh the lower energy costs necessary to build a space colony (especially if we can get raw materials from asteroids w/o having to come up out of a gravity well), as much solar energy available as we can spread the panels for, plus the ability to create "normal" gravity.
I don't buy the species survival argument for space colonization. Humans are a weed species. We, with rudimentary technology and only locally available materials, have succefullly colonized habitats from the Congo to the Arctic. No conceivable environmental change would render the planet uninhabitable by individuals of the human species.
If you can't conceive of such an environmental change, it merely means your imagination isn't good enough.
There IS evidence that at least a couple of times during the planet's history that all animal life larger than a rodent was completely wiped out.
Weed species or not, there are a few perfectly plausible scenarios (albeit low probability) that would result in the complete destruction of all humans (probably most of the rest of the life on the planet too).
Even assuming a subextinction event, where most of humanity perishes leaving only survivalists & aboriginals back in the Stone Ages, there's a chance that humanity would never be able to regain our current level of civilization again, given that we are consuming all of the easily accessible large-quantity stored-energy sources (fossil fuels) which took millions of years to form. It would be hard to build large-scale industry (which often requires high concentrations of power) powered by wind, solar & burning trees.
Sorry, I should have been more specific in my description: I was specifically referring to the situation where the individuals in the government haven't necessarily become outright fascist, but that the idea of "maintaining law and order" (i.e., the "process" of government) has become more important to the government than the actual maintenance of the health of the society.
If your government has become blatantly fascist & corrupt (where the "powers-that-be" are exploiting the society without restraint & they don't even care about maintaining appearances), then you are correct: there is very little chance that the system can be used to save itself, and you have to go "outside" of the system for solutions.
Perhaps you can explain WHY the Constitution specifically requires that people can be tried by a "jury of their peers", if not for the reason if giving common citizens a way to nullify unjust laws or judicial decisions.
A little hint: it's not because such a jury is going to "weigh the evidence" better than a panel of people who have received training in analyzing legal & evidentiary issues.
It's specifically because the Founders wanted a last-ditch mechanism for common citizens to protect each other if all three branches of government are operating out of the bounds of common sense.
It's only natural that the judicial system try and discourage this kind of thinking (and it's a damn shame that schools don't teach enough American Civics anymore to make people aware of their duties in this area), but that doesn't change the original intent of the Founders, and it's one damn good way for people to push back against an out-of-control government.
It's too bad there aren't more such ways. I personally think that it should be a Constitutional right to vote, regardless of whether you've been convicted of a crime or not (unlike the usual policies of disenfranchising convicted felons).
The way I see it, if your society is running in a healthy way, then there shouldn't be too many criminals & their vote won't have much of an effect on votes/elections.
If the government is heading in a direction where it's criminalizing a large chunk of the populace, however (which is a common tactic when the "leaders" of a society want to disenfranchise people who don't support them), then the votes of the convicted should provide a valuable negative feedback mechanism to the officials being elected to make them think twice about what kinds of laws they are passing.
Aside from being able to get some raw materials from the surface of the Moon, it's actually more of a pain to put a colony on the Moon than it would be to build a space colony.
Even though its weaker than Earth's, you've still got that damn gravity well to climb down into & out of, you can't even change the "gravity" like you could in a space station, and you have to deal with all that damn dust which mucks up your machinery & gets into your lungs.
We'd learn a LOT more about living in space by building a fairly self-sufficient space colony, and have quite a few more options of where to put the colony & control over the living environment.
I think the point is pretty moot, though - I don't see either public or private sector with the will to expend the resources necessary to get such an ambitious project put together.
Frankly, short of a potential all-life-ending scare like an asteroid or massive plague, the bulk of humanity seems to have lost any motivation to expand out into space, and are more-or-less content to fight each other for resources until there won't be enough resources left to expand out into space on a large scale.
To get the money out of politics, the best path is to [avoid concentration of wealth] and limit [concentration of] power.
Fixed that for you.
If you include ANY large organization in that sweeping statement (e.g., including corporations), then I'd agree with you. Otherwise, you're just another libertarian nutjob who believes in the Tooth Fairy and that an unregulated free market won't end up screwing over the poor.
The libertarian attitude toward compassion (and the emphasis on lack of it) is one of the reasons why normal, civil folk try and tune rabid libertarians out like the crazy maybe-dangerous bum muttering to himself in the alleyway.
Aside from my anti-libertarian rant, what would you think about a "tax" system where you were still required to pay "taxes", but instead of paying taxes to some central organization like a government, you got to pick which parts of the public infrastructure you wanted to fund? Or maybe some hybrid system where some base part of the taxes went to basic services like fire & local police, basic education, etc, but the money above that amount could be spent anywhere else for the public good as long as you didn't try and keep it?
Hey Bub, if the voting machines say Bush gets the vote, then no goddamn piece of paper should get in the way of reelecting the man. Do you support America or are you some kind of terrorist?
Out comes a printout with all of the ticks, crosses, and numbers in the right place.
Better yet, just have the printout show the final choices (in an easily readable form), without any of the alternatives. This makes it harder to confuse adjacent voting choices when counting. If the user realises the choices aren't right, they can return the printout to an available shredder & vote again. If they accept the choices, they drop the printout into the ballot box.
There's nothing wrong with using a machine to print out the ballot.
You can handle a lot of disabilities that way, and make the ballot nice and readable so that a voter can easily verify that the choices on the ballot are the ones that they wanted (by getting rid of all of the OTHER choices, for instance).
Once you've got that voter-readable ballot, however, you've got to have a corruption-resistant way of counting them, and just about all of the current electronic-voting systems currently in existence fail that test miserably.
What I can't believe is how many of the voting machine companies completely blew off the existing voting process when designing their machines. Most of the existing laws about counting votes (like chain of custody laws, and multiple-party monitoring) came about to fix weaknesses that were discovered during the process of having elections. Why were all those hard-earned rules thrown out just because we wanted to count with a machine?
I love people who automatically fail an idea because there's potential to abuse it.
Do you also love people who propose ideas without checking to see if the idea has already been tried and failed?
There are plenty of historical examples of political corruption where voters were either bribed or intimidated into supporting a particular party (read history about Chicago's political "machines"). The moment it became difficult to verify a voter's vote, then that kind of pressure wasn't much of a problem anymore.
Your idea about fining violators is naive. What do you think a legislator who was elected by voting fraud is going to do when he/she gets into office? Quietly get rid of the legislation that defines the fines (or make them so small that companies/organizations won't care about paying them).
There's a LOT of people who will bribe or intimidate voters if the vote can be verified, because there's is so much to gain in both power and money through control of the government (and because they can use the same mechanisms of government to shield themselves from punishment).
The best voting setups today were developed through a lot of trial-and-error to counteract problems that were encountered during history. If you're going to propose "solutions" to voting schemes, then at least read enough about the history to know why certain aspects of voting systems are being proposed. Otherwise, you are only revealing your ignorance.
give the people the benefit of the doubt and start with the assumption that they'd be honest and show integrity. If you assume I'm a liar to start with, why would I care as much if i became one
And this statement demonstrates either disingenuousness, or naivete bordering on stupidity. The process of voting is not about the best way to establish a good personal relationship with someone else.
People don't think about it much since the power of a single vote seems so trivial, but the results of voting are often literally about life and death (criminal laws), gobs of money, or transferring power to someone.
With those kinds of prizes available, it is the height of irresponsibility to propose voting systems that allow a small group of people to override the aggregate decision of the voters.
There is no such thing as a "right to intellectual property". People can be granted the PRIVILEGE of intellectual proeprty protection with the goal of encouraging creativity/innovation, but it is not a right.
It's really this simple: why the hell do we have to compare our government to that of a 3rd World militant theocracy? Have our standards fallen so low that we have to resort to the excuse "at least we're not THAT bad!" ? That's so pathetic.
That means you have to block ALL encrypted connections, which limits a big chunk of usefulness of the net and makes all your kid's net traffic (including user names & passwords) vulnerable to people monitoring network data.
If there's a troll here, its not me. You might want to crawl back under your bridge though.
Until his friends teach him how to use an encrypted proxy connections.
Simplistic solutions like yours make it easier for savvy teenagers to get the thrill of porn-viewing, rule-breaking and losing respect for adult competence all at once.
Slashdot Mirror
What the patent examiners really ought to do is to set the bar MUCH higher for granting patents. They're not going to do that while they have a quota for granting patents though, rather than just a quota for processing patents.
You won't know until you've checked your stats.
It was also stated that the prisoners at Gitmo did not have the same Constitutional rights as everyone else in our society. This was an incorrect statement.
As far seeing only what you want to see, I suggest you carefully examine your own response.
If we were actually at war, then that might be applicable. Since it was WWII the last time Congress has actually declared war against anyone, and they are the ONLY body Constitutionally allowed to do so, then that caveat does not apply. All Constitutional guarantees are still active, including the rights protected under statutory and treaty laws that derive their legality from the Constitution.
The fact that members of the executive branch seem to be ignoring such laws is an indication of their criminality, not of the correctness of their actions.
That's because the politicos in the U.S. are MUCH more advanced about manipulating the media than in China.
They don't have to throw anybody in jail (which can given credence to someone's message) when they can use the media to completely discredit anybody whose message starts becoming dangerous.
Once someone has been discredited in the eyes of the public, it becomes very difficult for them to say ANYTHING that will be taken seriously, even if what they're saying is perfectly true. People will (in some cases actively) rationalize why that person must be wrong.
You are incorrect on a couple fronts.
1) The power of the U.S. Constitution (including the Bill of Rights + all of its amendments) applies to EVERYONE in U.S. jurisdiction, not just citizens.
There are only a few places in the Constitution which are specific to citizens, and they mainly have to do with defining who gets to vote, and who they get to vote for. Statutory law might be more specific, but there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents anyone under U.S. jurisdiction from receiving the same level of human rights protections as its citizens.
2) The U.S. Constitution specifically says that treaties that the U.S. is signatory to, must be given the same priority as the "law of the land". I suspect that the Founders wanted to reassure the rest of the world that the U.S. would take treaty obligations seriously, and not just blow off promises in the next session of Congress.
This includes the Geneva Convention, which has all that prisoner-of-war stuff that you (and the Administration) seem to be so intent on ignoring.
Well, let's just say that it's a LOT less effective to complain about human right violations in another country when you've got a list of human rights violations that your own country is violating being splashed across the pages of just about every newspaper and web site.
Although I have no doubts that kind of crap has gone on throughout history, at least in the past it was kept secret enough & at a low enough level that a lot of Americans could deny that it was happening.
Now it's so blatant that some people have given up trying to deny it, and turn around and try and JUSTIFY it. Strangely enough, any justification used for our own country's behavior is logically applicable to every other country's behavior.
Do you really think it's effective to complain about another country's human rights violations in that context?
As far as your example goes, would you be inclined to believe a police officer was arresting people for good reasons if you had been hearing nothing but news about how all of the officers from the department that officer came from were arresting random people with no more stated purpose "they looked suspicious"?
That would probably work most of the time, but there's always the chance that the identities of that fake news team would be leaked somehow & they might either be in trouble, or their associations could be tracked back to their superiors. Budding fascists tend to be "bully" types - they like to be able to hurt, intimidate & control while minimizing any risk to themselves.
Also, if they could get the dragonfly stuff to work right (assuming that such a system even exists), they can automate the process of scanning the crowd & collecting faces (including directing the individual flies to move to where they can get the best views of the largest # of faces) and collect a nice big database of potential troublemakers, whereas it would be a little harder to maneuver a team of people around to make sure you got the best pictures of everyone present.
As I've been mentioning before, it's hard to believe that there is such a system implemented in any practical sort of way, however. Just the power requirements would seem to limit keeping a tiny remote-controlled device aloft more than ~15 minutes at a time, much less receiving & transmitting any significant amount of information, and someone in a crowd of people might think it was odd if all of the "insects" keep on moving back to their home base to recharge/refuel.
Noting a public protest: "Wow, there's a lot of people at that protest - maybe we'd better address what they're saying so that we don't get voted out the next election cycle!"
Spying at a public protest: "Make sure you get a record of everyone's faces & match them up to names & addresses so we know who the troublemakers are."
Note that the 1st response doesn't require any sort of stealthy surveillance. I'm interested in hearing your opinion about the justification for the second kind of surveillance.
Of course, that assumes that these "mechanical dragonflies" that are being reported weren't just a figment of some peoples' imaginations, seeing as they were apparently so easy to see, but nobody managed to catch one of them & get a closeup picture of it.
If such a technology DOES exist, I think it would be a lot more useful to society if this kind of technology were used to keep track of the doings of our so-called public servants, along with anyone they interact with on a regular basis.
It's perfectly straightforward for a large enough space colony to create its own "gravity", at almost any level of Gs the superstructure can survive. On a planetary surface you're stuck with the gravity that the planet provides.
You have to go out & do maintenance on the buildings, or make new buildings at least. Even if you're using robots, you would have to bring the robots back into service them.
Lunar dust is particularly nasty because it's apparently small enough to cause silicosis (same sort of thing which abestos causes), plus the nanoparticles are particularly good at gumming up machines.
Now, the benefits of the moon (or other planetary surface): lots of raw material to work with, plus if we dig our colony deep we can get protection from meteorites & solar flares (only get partial protection if we're on the surface). Feel free to let me know if you can think of anything else.
I'm not sure that these advantages outweigh the lower energy costs necessary to build a space colony (especially if we can get raw materials from asteroids w/o having to come up out of a gravity well), as much solar energy available as we can spread the panels for, plus the ability to create "normal" gravity.
If you can't conceive of such an environmental change, it merely means your imagination isn't good enough.
There IS evidence that at least a couple of times during the planet's history that all animal life larger than a rodent was completely wiped out.
Weed species or not, there are a few perfectly plausible scenarios (albeit low probability) that would result in the complete destruction of all humans (probably most of the rest of the life on the planet too).
Even assuming a subextinction event, where most of humanity perishes leaving only survivalists & aboriginals back in the Stone Ages, there's a chance that humanity would never be able to regain our current level of civilization again, given that we are consuming all of the easily accessible large-quantity stored-energy sources (fossil fuels) which took millions of years to form. It would be hard to build large-scale industry (which often requires high concentrations of power) powered by wind, solar & burning trees.
Sorry, I should have been more specific in my description: I was specifically referring to the situation where the individuals in the government haven't necessarily become outright fascist, but that the idea of "maintaining law and order" (i.e., the "process" of government) has become more important to the government than the actual maintenance of the health of the society.
If your government has become blatantly fascist & corrupt (where the "powers-that-be" are exploiting the society without restraint & they don't even care about maintaining appearances), then you are correct: there is very little chance that the system can be used to save itself, and you have to go "outside" of the system for solutions.
Perhaps you can explain WHY the Constitution specifically requires that people can be tried by a "jury of their peers", if not for the reason if giving common citizens a way to nullify unjust laws or judicial decisions.
A little hint: it's not because such a jury is going to "weigh the evidence" better than a panel of people who have received training in analyzing legal & evidentiary issues.
It's specifically because the Founders wanted a last-ditch mechanism for common citizens to protect each other if all three branches of government are operating out of the bounds of common sense.
It's only natural that the judicial system try and discourage this kind of thinking (and it's a damn shame that schools don't teach enough American Civics anymore to make people aware of their duties in this area), but that doesn't change the original intent of the Founders, and it's one damn good way for people to push back against an out-of-control government.
It's too bad there aren't more such ways. I personally think that it should be a Constitutional right to vote, regardless of whether you've been convicted of a crime or not (unlike the usual policies of disenfranchising convicted felons).
The way I see it, if your society is running in a healthy way, then there shouldn't be too many criminals & their vote won't have much of an effect on votes/elections.
If the government is heading in a direction where it's criminalizing a large chunk of the populace, however (which is a common tactic when the "leaders" of a society want to disenfranchise people who don't support them), then the votes of the convicted should provide a valuable negative feedback mechanism to the officials being elected to make them think twice about what kinds of laws they are passing.
Are you kidding? The smokes and sparks are the best part!
Aside from being able to get some raw materials from the surface of the Moon, it's actually more of a pain to put a colony on the Moon than it would be to build a space colony.
Even though its weaker than Earth's, you've still got that damn gravity well to climb down into & out of, you can't even change the "gravity" like you could in a space station, and you have to deal with all that damn dust which mucks up your machinery & gets into your lungs.
We'd learn a LOT more about living in space by building a fairly self-sufficient space colony, and have quite a few more options of where to put the colony & control over the living environment.
I think the point is pretty moot, though - I don't see either public or private sector with the will to expend the resources necessary to get such an ambitious project put together.
Frankly, short of a potential all-life-ending scare like an asteroid or massive plague, the bulk of humanity seems to have lost any motivation to expand out into space, and are more-or-less content to fight each other for resources until there won't be enough resources left to expand out into space on a large scale.
That works right up until you're trying to debug a problem which occurs only in production.
Fixed that for you.
If you include ANY large organization in that sweeping statement (e.g., including corporations), then I'd agree with you. Otherwise, you're just another libertarian nutjob who believes in the Tooth Fairy and that an unregulated free market won't end up screwing over the poor.
The libertarian attitude toward compassion (and the emphasis on lack of it) is one of the reasons why normal, civil folk try and tune rabid libertarians out like the crazy maybe-dangerous bum muttering to himself in the alleyway.
Aside from my anti-libertarian rant, what would you think about a "tax" system where you were still required to pay "taxes", but instead of paying taxes to some central organization like a government, you got to pick which parts of the public infrastructure you wanted to fund? Or maybe some hybrid system where some base part of the taxes went to basic services like fire & local police, basic education, etc, but the money above that amount could be spent anywhere else for the public good as long as you didn't try and keep it?
Hey Bub, if the voting machines say Bush gets the vote, then no goddamn piece of paper should get in the way of reelecting the man. Do you support America or are you some kind of terrorist?
Better yet, just have the printout show the final choices (in an easily readable form), without any of the alternatives. This makes it harder to confuse adjacent voting choices when counting. If the user realises the choices aren't right, they can return the printout to an available shredder & vote again. If they accept the choices, they drop the printout into the ballot box.
There's nothing wrong with using a machine to print out the ballot.
You can handle a lot of disabilities that way, and make the ballot nice and readable so that a voter can easily verify that the choices on the ballot are the ones that they wanted (by getting rid of all of the OTHER choices, for instance).
Once you've got that voter-readable ballot, however, you've got to have a corruption-resistant way of counting them, and just about all of the current electronic-voting systems currently in existence fail that test miserably.
What I can't believe is how many of the voting machine companies completely blew off the existing voting process when designing their machines. Most of the existing laws about counting votes (like chain of custody laws, and multiple-party monitoring) came about to fix weaknesses that were discovered during the process of having elections. Why were all those hard-earned rules thrown out just because we wanted to count with a machine?
Do you also love people who propose ideas without checking to see if the idea has already been tried and failed?
There are plenty of historical examples of political corruption where voters were either bribed or intimidated into supporting a particular party (read history about Chicago's political "machines"). The moment it became difficult to verify a voter's vote, then that kind of pressure wasn't much of a problem anymore.
Your idea about fining violators is naive. What do you think a legislator who was elected by voting fraud is going to do when he/she gets into office? Quietly get rid of the legislation that defines the fines (or make them so small that companies/organizations won't care about paying them).
There's a LOT of people who will bribe or intimidate voters if the vote can be verified, because there's is so much to gain in both power and money through control of the government (and because they can use the same mechanisms of government to shield themselves from punishment).
The best voting setups today were developed through a lot of trial-and-error to counteract problems that were encountered during history. If you're going to propose "solutions" to voting schemes, then at least read enough about the history to know why certain aspects of voting systems are being proposed. Otherwise, you are only revealing your ignorance.
And this statement demonstrates either disingenuousness, or naivete bordering on stupidity. The process of voting is not about the best way to establish a good personal relationship with someone else.
People don't think about it much since the power of a single vote seems so trivial, but the results of voting are often literally about life and death (criminal laws), gobs of money, or transferring power to someone.
With those kinds of prizes available, it is the height of irresponsibility to propose voting systems that allow a small group of people to override the aggregate decision of the voters.
They wouldn't take him. Kim Jong Il doesn't like competition in Whacko Land.
There is no such thing as a "right to intellectual property". People can be granted the PRIVILEGE of intellectual proeprty protection with the goal of encouraging creativity/innovation, but it is not a right.
It's really this simple: why the hell do we have to compare our government to that of a 3rd World militant theocracy? Have our standards fallen so low that we have to resort to the excuse "at least we're not THAT bad!" ? That's so pathetic.
That means you have to block ALL encrypted connections, which limits a big chunk of usefulness of the net and makes all your kid's net traffic (including user names & passwords) vulnerable to people monitoring network data.
If there's a troll here, its not me. You might want to crawl back under your bridge though.
Until his friends teach him how to use an encrypted proxy connections.
Simplistic solutions like yours make it easier for savvy teenagers to get the thrill of porn-viewing, rule-breaking and losing respect for adult competence all at once.
You sound like a terrorist.
Then you've got that nasty little problem of what happens when your neighbors realize that they have to get YOU before you get them.